Antique & Vintage Postcards

Chrome advertising card for The Highlander Motor Hotel in Calgary, framed in Royal Stewart tartan and tagged "A Place Ye Canna Forget" — the Scottish kitsch turned up to eleven at a moment when Calgary was booming on oil money and highway motels were a genuine novelty. A traveler named Ned mailed this to friends in Virginia in February 1969 and reported on a winter that was something else entirely: the warmest it got was seven below zero, January had 28 days without breaking that, the low hit -38 in Calgary and -53 at Grande Prairie. He was wrapping up his appointments and heading home the next day via Vancouver, Seattle, and St. Louis — the circuit of a working life on the road, written in two inches of cursive on the back of a tartan postcard.